There can be no substantive end or purpose to life. After all, someone who defines an end or purpose for man becomes a black-and-white thinker, a potential fascist. Like Arthur Schlesinger and the consensus liberals, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality rely on warm gestures and open-ended ideals—“behaving realistically,” achieving “self-insight,” and “being fully aware.” Such phrases, right out of Popper’s lexicon, are versions of the postwar rhetoric that develops open-ended, fuzzy substitutes for words such as virtue and truth.
